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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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https://www.reuters.com/world/us/rubio-says-us-will-start-revoking-visas-chinese-students-2025-05-28/

WASHINGTON, May 28 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday the United States will start "aggressively" revoking visas of Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.

If applied to a broad segment of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese university students in the United States, the move could disrupt a major source of income for American schools and a crucial pipeline of talent for U.S. technology companies.

President Donald Trump's administration has sought to ramp up deportations and revoke student visas as part of wide-ranging efforts to fulfill its hardline immigration agenda. In a statement, Rubio said the State Department will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from China and Hong Kong.

"The U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students," he said.

To what extent is this foreign/defense policy, and to what extent is this a fig leaf for prior CW against higher education and foreign students? Shouldn't we be trying to deprive the PRC of human capital? Being anti-CCP, I'm concerned about stuff like this, but a "to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students," where "Chinese student" is the only criteria given by the Secretary of State doesn't seem like a good idea.

Edit: A longer quote of Rubio, via Politico (???):

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” he said in a statement. “We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”

If anything, this just seems dumber - why is it "Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields," rather than "Those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party, regardless of citizenship?"

Noah Smith makes a good case that international students are good, but it's paywalled. However, here's a quote answering the question of whether foreign students displace or subsidize native students:

All this tuition money from international students allows American universities to pay for more spots for domestic students. In fact, you can see this effect in action. Shih (2017) looked at the effects of various exogenous shocks — baby booms in foreign countries that led to more international enrollment in the 90s, and then 9/11, when increased suspicion of international students led to a sudden drop in enrollment. He found that when more international kids attended a U.S. university, the number of spots for American students also rose:

I focus on a dramatic increase in international enrollment at U.S. graduate programs during the late 1990s, which suddenly reversed following heightened scrutiny of student visa applications in the aftermath of 9/11…The primary findings reveal that international students actually raise domestic enrollment. Preferred estimates indicate that 10 additional international students increase domestic enrollment by roughly 8…This positive effect also appears during the bust period…

At the margin universities can charge international students high prices and use the profits to subsidize the cost of enrolling more domestic students…I provide multiple forms of evidence that indicate cross-subsidization underlies the crowd-in effects. The positive impacts appear to be driven by foreign Master's students, who pay full-sticker price tuition…[T]he positive impacts are concentrated on domestic graduate students in academic programs, who require subsidies…[T]he crowd-in effects are most pronounced among public universities which prioritize enrolling domestic students, pricing tuition below cost for state residents, while also charging foreign students tuition rates between 2 and 3 times higher.

If you were to kick out all of America’s 1.1 million international students, Shih’s estimate would suggest that domestic enrollment would fall by 800,000. Even if it were only half or a quarter of that, that’s a substantial number of Americans who wouldn’t get the chance to go to college.

And the burden would fall hardest on state schools, for whom the difference in tuition between foreign and domestic students is highest, and who have already suffered the most from funding cuts. State schools are much more important for uplifting the American working class into the middle class than Harvard or MIT. So by kicking out international students, Trump is depriving the working class of life-changing educational opportunities.

Mainland Chinese students (and some ethnic Chinese 2nd+ generation residents/citizens) have been doing Industrial Espionage for the CCP for ages. This could be justified on that alone if they don't have the state capacity to vet them for access to certain research projects.

I can't see how Chinese students in particular are involved in the latest Israel/Gaza 'terrorist support' fiasco. They usually keep a low profile regarding politics. Ethnic chinese students are often monitored by the CCP in foreign countries for support of Chinese related stuff (Taiwan, Falun Gong, Tibet, Uyghurs, Hong Kong etc). Haven't seen any of that flare up recently.

Mainland Chinese students (and some ethnic Chinese 2nd+ generation residents/citizens) have been doing Industrial Espionage for the CCP for ages. This could be justified on that alone if they don't have the state capacity to vet them for access to certain research projects.

There are plenty of subfields in STEM where industrial espionage is not a concern. Pure mathematics or theoretical physics might be subject to someone stealing your paper drafts, but not industrial espionage per se. Likewise, civil engineering.

"If your project has any industrial application of interest to the CCP, assume that any Chinese national is legally obliged to share any information they have access to or can easily obtain with the CCP" is not a super-hard concept to grok. Pass a law which makes it easy to exclude Chinese citizens who have not credibly renounced their citizenship (not that any would do so now before being naturalized in the US) on any research projects which the CCP might be interested in.

"If your project has any industrial application of interest to the CCP, assume that any Chinese national is legally obliged to share any information they have access to or can easily obtain with the CCP"

Western govts have the capacity to create a basic screen like this, but for some reason they don't. I wish they did and had even a clown HR'ish rep to run research students through a basic process screen like this and send it up the chain for further analysis if it gets complicated.

some reason

My best guess is that reason comes in the form of black suitcases full of colored rectangles with nice pictures on them.

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